We 30 Sep 09

IDFA Film
'Megacities'

The IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) is the world’s biggest festival for film documentaries. At the request of the IABR, the IDFA compiled a special series of film documentaries about the city, which will be shown at the Biennale.

Title: Megacities (1998, 90min)
Director: Michael Glawogger

Life on the fringes of society in four metropolises - Moscow, Bombay, Mexico-City and New York depicted in an expressive style.

Simple craftsmen in Bombay, petty thieves and prostitutes in Mexico-City, assembly line workers in Moscow and a swindler in New York. At first sight, these figures, often living on the fringes of society in four metropolises, are not really connected. The hawker in Mexico-City, selling self-cooked drumsticks, and the hairdresser in Bombay, receiving his customers in some sort of converted garage, do not know about each others lives. But what they share is the harsh, daily struggle for survival, in which the likelihood of progress is minimal, but each of them keeps cherishing his own dreams. Director Michael Glawogger is primarily a superb photographer who, by selecting his images with great care, gets down to the root of the matter without using an excess of comment and interview excerpts. The style that he applies both in the frame composition and in editing is never exaggerated or indolent. He does not embellish things, but demonstrates that a heroic urge to survive underlies the daily drabness and misery of life in a big city.At the same time, he manages to reveal the typical traits of each city, like the reading passengers in the Moscow subway. He films them while they are silent, but we hear the stories they could be reading. For instance, about the writer who asks: 'Where on earth do all these beggars and drifters come from?' Someone answers: 'They come crawling from the cracks in the street!', to which the writer says: 'That was not what I meant, I want to know what has happened to them.'

Where & when
The Hood, NAI
30 Sept, 15:00 
Reservations: www.nai.nl/register
Infromation: +31 10 4401342
entrance with day ticket/PP